Who Am I Writing For?

I had a question posed to me the other day that has plagued me for a couple of years now. What is my target audience. In other words, who am I writing for?

Take the somewhat infamous John Locke, he swears by finding a target market and writing for them. That’s an approach geared towards being a writing machine and not one with heart and soul. Still, he’s had some success with it so maybe there’s something to it.

Me, I’ll admit that right now I have a hard time branching out very much. I have some moderately successful books so I tend to try and stay in the same series. If I know I can write a book that stands a good chance of generating $500 – $1000 a month it’s hard for me to take a chance on trying something new that only brings in $20 – $50 a month. And yes,  I have books in both categories. Take Sex Sells and Human Nature, both great stories that people really enjoy, but the number of people enjoying them is very limited. Compare that to my Blades of Leander or Wanted Trilogy and it’s like pitting the Detroit Redwings against my friends and I when we were young enough to play roller hockey ever Saturday in a church parking lot.

Human Nature, sci-fi / romance by Jason Halstead

Sex Sells, a romantica novel by Jason Halstead

My wife wants me to write murder mystery and is offering me bonus points if I can add in an artful blend of smut. I’ll be honest, I’d love to figure out how I can pull it off – there’s a huge audience out there for it. I have to find a story and characters that talk to me first. Unfortunately I can’t just walk around in a nearby Pier 1 store until something starts singing to me to find it. That and, until my writing career is my day job, I tend to stick with the books that I know will give me a return that gets me closer to realizing my goals. When I get to that point I’ll be happy to do some experimenting now and then, but I plan to keep up with the existing material as well. I don’t just write it because people want me to, I write it because it’s what I like too.

Currently I focus on science fiction and fantasy genres, with some carry over into urban fantasy. I tend to mesh them all together from time to time, but my most successful books are definitely pure science fiction and pure fantasy. But am I targeting an audience or a genre? No, I’m not. I’m just telling stories about people and I put them in a setting that allowed me tell it.

Speaking of characters, I’ve had character concepts that I knew I had to do something with but I didn’t know what, how, or when to do them. Katalina Wimple, star character of The Lost Girls series, is one such person. I had no idea what to do with her when she smacked me in the back of the head one day and demanded I tell people about her. I theorized putting her in something unique or trying to work her into an existing series (I had done this with a few characters and story ideas in my Voidhawk series already). With Kat she almost became my first attempt at a murder / mystery / detective genre – but I realized she was too self-destructive and couldn’t survive without some help. Thus it became a natural fit for her to be in my Dark Earth setting.

Having said all of that, I also set out at one point with the intent to write a pure genre specific story because the genre seemed to have a lot of opportunity. Thus begat my Child of Fate book and later Victim of Fate and Silver Dragon (the Blades of Leander trilogy). And yes, it’s done very well for itself since it came out only a few months ago. I intend to continue the stories further, but have yet to begin doing so.

In other books I’ve stuck with science fiction as a genre. My Vitalis series was crazy successful last spring and summer. I even had one fan tell me how she had never had any interest in science fiction but she took a risk on Vitalis. It was the perfect gateway drug into scifi because I focused on the characters and on telling a story, not on the scifi aspect. She has become a loyal and dedicated fan and regularly interacts with me. To follow up on that I’m finishing my third Vitalis novel (Vitalis: Provenance) this week or next and planning to release it in early May). I wasn’t writing those books with a desire to go after a market though, I was writing about characters that had to be in that setting in order for me to share what I wanted share about them.

So what’s the answer to the question I keep dodging? I think I’m writing for everyone mature enough to handle what I’m writing. There is language in a lot of my stories that is not fitting for young adult or children’s books. There are adult themes unfitting for young adult or earlier. And in many there’s action and violence. I’d say I write for anyone 18 and above – I don’t discriminate. J

I do like to provide characters with quirks. People that are challenging and even difficult. People with traits or beliefs that make them unpopular or controversial. I have lesbians in some of my books, one of them a man hating destructive lesbian in fact. I have a gay couple in one of my books as well – the interesting thing about that is that I’ve received nothing but kudos from women for portraying female characters (especially the lesbian) as realistic and touching. On the other hand I received a review or two that was scathing for daring to write about gay men with any level of detail. The review was written by a man who found it disagreeable and refused to read it because of that, then he left a bad review to follow up on it.

I’m a live and let live kind of guy, just don’t push anything on me. If he felt I was pushing homosexuality on him I sincerely apologize. There was nothing overt or excessive in the book that couldn’t be seen on prime time TV (well as far as that couple was concerned, there was a lot of bloodshed and violence later in the book but those were aliens – fair game).

If I’m guilty of anything it’s trying to put out a message of tolerance and open mindedness in my books. That and that if my characters can survive the crap I throw at them and make themselves better because of it, then maybe the average person reading the book is just as capable. In spite of our inability to elect governors that can get along and govern properly I’m a firm believer that the human race consists of billions of remarkable people that can do anything and everything, especially if we can put aside our biases and beliefs that make us prejudiced. To lead by example I’m even willing to go so far as to give Colorado Avalanche fans a fair chance.

 

To learn more about Jason Halstead, visit his website to read about him, sign up for his newsletter, or check out some free samples of his books at http://www.booksbyjason.com .